Marketing is suffering from an identity crisis. It's one of those every day activities that is critical for a businesses' success and yet very few people can agree exactly what it is.

It's a funny thing about marketing. Lots of people go to college and major in marketing. Lots of people have jobs with the title of director of marketing, Lots of people have consulting firms to help other businesses with their marketing,and goodness knows there's a healthy genre of blogs devoted to marketing.

And yet, if you were to ask three people to define marketing, you'd get five different definitions.

Try it. Take 30 seconds and write down your definition of marketing (this is an ice- breaker I often use when I'm kicking off a marketing workshop. I've never had two people give the same definition.) If you want, you can post the definition you use in the comment section.

As someone who lives in the world of marketing, having multiple definitions has its challenges. Whenever I have a potential client call about my marketing services I have to spend time trying to ascertain exactly what their definition of marketing is.

Sometimes they are calling for someone to help them with media relations.
Sometimes they say they want marketing and they actually want traditional PR.
Sometimes they want someone to write some newsletters or make sales calls for them.
Often they want someone to create an ad.

The American Marketing Association  recently announced it had changed its definition of marketing. Here is the official definition that the AMA now plans to use in all of its books by marketing professionals and classes.

The new definition reads:

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

The previous definition stated:

"Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders."

The AMA has plenty of competition. Here's just a sampling of how bloggers define marketing

Marketing a website is all about making it popular.
                         From Sugarrae Never Mess With a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

“Products/Services X Traffic/Leads X Conversion = Revenue.”  
                         From Susan Tatum at Technology Marketing Blog

Susan goes on to admonish the AMA for their new definition of Marketing saying,

>No offense to anyone personally at the AMA, but jeez. This is the kind of stuff that makes it so hard for non-marketing people – technical, sales and operations types for example – to take us seriously
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So it is with that bit of confusion that I share a post I became aware of via Yvonne DiVita's Lip-Sticking blog. Yvonne was amusingly bemoaning the fact that she had not thought of this idea before.

Her friend Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends recently asked a group of marketers to share their best kept marketing secrets. Yvonne shared hers. So did many marketing gurus including  Seth Godin ,Jackie Huba ,Toby Bloomberg and Mack Collier.

I love the idea of best kept secrets. One of my favorite wedding gifts was a cookbook called The Chef's Secret Cookbook by Louis SzathmAry--SzathmArny  owned a very popular restaurant  in Chicago called The Bakery and the concept of the cookbook is that with every recipe he shared a technique of preparation.

They were all simple things like making sure the egg whites are room temperature before trying to  beat them. But I adored them and gained enormous confidence in my cooking because I knew that I was doing something that a celebrated chef was  also doing.

So it is with Anita Campbell's list of best kept marketing secrets. Your not going to find anything eart hshattering on the list. What you will find are nuggets that can help you with your business --- regardless of how you define marketing.

Oh, and my own best kept secret. When you are being considered for a project or new client let them know how excited( very excited) you are about their project.

Elana blogs about business culture at FunnyBusiness.

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